London's Teeming Streets, 1830-1914

James Winter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136104367
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The streets of Victorian London became increasingly congested with vehicles, fast and furious drivers, pedestrians, costermongers, prostitutes, brass bands, homeless children and other obstacles to safe and rapid motion. Concerned citizens were alarmed by this unprecedented build-up of traffic and pollution. But how did this chaotic state come about - and why was more not done to prevent it?
London's Teeming Streets brings an historical perspective to present-day concerns about the effects of continued urban expansion and shows that many current problems date back to the Victorian era. James Winter reveals that the issue of street reform was fraught with political intrigue. Many reformers were liberals; yet the question of attempting to limit or prohibit activity on the King's Highway which was, by definition, an open and democratic preserve, brought the very purpose of liberal reform into sharp focus.

1

IMAGINING

Passageways and organic metaphors have natural affinities. From earliest times the human body has been thought of as a container made up of conduits for conveying blood and humors. Egyptian medicine understood the working of the body by means of the metaphor of the Nile's flooding and receding.¹ One branch of physiological studies in early eighteenth century Britain and on the Continent also defined the body as a structure of tubes and vessels and understood health to be the maintenance of a proper velocity of blood-flow through them.² This line of inquiry strongly impressed itself on medical amateurs and remained alive in metaphor after the main current of physiological studies was directed elsewhere.

Conversely, we have always read our built environments with our bodies.³ Especially in the eighteenth century, when citizens of a number of European cities began to be conscious of an unprecedented expansion to areas outside the familiar margins, circulatory imagery, much in vogue since William Harvey's discoveries in the early seventeenth century, filled a need to express the anxieties aroused by such blurring of boundary lines.⁴

Centrifugal and centripetal movements seemed to characterize both the body physical and the body social. The tides of humanity that flowed in with the morning light and out again in the late afternoon seemed to be drawn into the city's heart, and then back out again, along crowded corridors. As this perception took hold in the eighteenth century, the notion of what a street was began to alter. Its definition tended to cast loose from the original meaning of “stratum” (any kind of artificial layer wherever constructed) and become something quintessentially urban: a passageway lined on one or both sides with a more or less regular and continuous row of buildings. Thus city dwellers among us may have for our addresses a Close, Crescent, Walk, or Way and do our shopping on an Avenue, Road, Terrace, or Place; but law and general usage will recognize them all as streets.⁵ Furthermore, the streets we live on or frequent testify to our aspirations or to the way fate has dealt with them. They also supply us with lines of social demarcation inside an environment that is otherwise in constant flux. They are fixed points in our turning world and give definition to spaces lacking in margins.

That our cities are constantly tearing down boundary lines arouses anxiety in us, as it did in our predecessors. Thus we are able to bridge the years that separate us and respond in an immediate way to the dismay expressed by a mid-nineteenth-century Londoner at how his city seemed to be intent on devouring everything around it. It creeps, wrote W.J. Loftie, “like the tide of the sea, slowly but surely, year by year, and obliterates, as it goes, all the original features of the countryside.” First to be eroded away are the green fields, then the villages with their old houses and historical memories, and finally the topography itself: “rivers and ravines are masked, hills are levelled, marshes are hidden. A flood of brick fills up the hollows. The brooks run far underground. The flats are elevated, and the heights depressed.”⁶ Perhaps we have lived inside this process so long that we no longer have quite the same sense of alarm, but we can still share the feeling, to use Loftie's word, of being “contaminated” by all this eating away, swallowing up, digesting, and excreting.

It would be in the London of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that Loftie's perception of chaos and the need to find ways to order it would have been first and most strongly felt. In that phenomenon among cities, confusion had a long history. During the Tudor period wheeled vehicles began to alter the circulatory system which had up to then been organized around the grand highway of the Thames, and this change caused people, but particularly visitors, to join their concept of the city with notions of disconnectedness and disarray. The phenomenal rate of population and spatial growth in the eighteenth century deepened the sense of those who jostled and threaded their way through swarms of strangers that each was “one atom in a drift of human dust,”⁷ moving through the circulatory apparatus of some huge creature which was breathing, growing, and responding to forces beyond comprehension and control. Some people, unsettled by this perception, gave expression to their feelings in images of London as a parasite feeding off the countryside, Cobbett's “Infernal Wen” being one memorable variation on this theme.⁸ Others, especially in the eighteenth century, observed this seemingly inexorable expansion with wonder. They used images of a hub, a giant market and entrepôt, of a vortex or spongelike invertebrate which drew vital and inert particles in and out. Men and women who were in tune with Dr Johnson's outlook took delight in the vast theatre and emporium of human variety and eccentricity. For them the London street was the epitome of life itself.

Subsequently, writers of poetry, fiction, and social reportage continued to make use of this profusion of imagery; and, as uneasiness about the blurring of margins increased, so did the use of illness analogies. Earlier it tended to be the irrepressible energy of the urban organism which fascinated or appalled; however, by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, there appeared an overlay of concern about the possibility that something debilitating and self-destructive might be part of this growth process, fears that excessive strain was being placed on the delicate mechanism which determined how much should be drawn into the city's heart and how much vital fluid should be pumped out to the extremities. If that balance should be disrupted, then the circulatory system might cease to function properly, arteries might harden, and the body become sluggish or seriously ill. A journal article in 1866, entitled “How Our Millions Circulate,” expressed it this way: “The great emporium of trade has been making blood too fast, and now its heart has become so over-burthened, that it can hardly perform its function.”⁹

Now and then this kind of anxiety can be discovered in the eighteenth century. Early in Laurence Sterne's novel we learn that Tristram's father, Walter Shandy, when he had occasion to refer to the London he so despised, was prone to use the symbol of “distemper,” a condition “where blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down. …” When this happened, he asserted (continuing the analogy between the human body and the body politic), “a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases.”¹⁰ This same idea, presented in a clinical rather than a satirical mode, can be found in a book published in 1766, about the bewildering changes taking place in the fabric of the city. The author was a noted architect and engraver, a friend of Dr Johnson's, John Glynn. He cautioned that “when the limbs extend themselves too fast, and grow out of proportion to the body which is to nourish and sustain them, it may very rationally be supposed that a consumption may be the consequence.”¹¹

The public at large was not likely to shrug off such a warning as this since “consumption” was a word freighted with anxiety and mystery.¹² Moreover, the equation of health with balance and proportion was deeply implanted in the culture. How that idea could be applied in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is demonstrated in William Buchan's popular manual of home diagnosis and remedy, Domestic Medicine, first published in 1770 and widely available in new editions into the mid-1820s. Again and again he returns the reader to the debilitating consequences of pumping into the system more than can be expelled by normal, natural means. If, Buchan warns, the body retains for too long that which it ought to expel or dissipate, the result is a “plethora, or too great fulness of the vessels,” a condition which can cause “acrimony and putrescence.” Fullness, he continues, is brought on by irregular eating, drinking, and elimination habits or by behavior which upsets “the animal economy.” Blood-letting is, as might be expected, among his suggested remedies, but his emphasis is on prevention: more exercise; consumption of pure vegetables; and, whenever possible, filling the lungs with fresh, country air — escaping, in other words, the contagion, pollution, adulteration, excessive stimulation, and over-indulgence commonly associated with city environments.¹³ This concept of plethora long outlasted in metaphor its value to medical science. Imagination reaches for what it needs to control anxiety, and that need was never greater than during the visitations of cholera in the 1830s and 1840s. It was at this time that cholera and fever came to be thought of as urban illnesses and a link formed between sanitary and urban reform, a connection which was bound to produce rich imagery,¹⁴ especially since concern about density and epidemic coincided with a cluster of circumstances which, acting together, created a sense of emergency. Benthamite utilitarians joined with philanthropic enthusiasts to initiate reform legislation at a time when the ferment surrounding the parliamentary reform movement made the central government especially alert to the need to find ways to reduce popular discord. At the same time, an increase in the tempo of population growth and suburban expansion in London, facilitated by new forms of public transport, drew attention to the capital as a special problem. Out of this perception of crisis arose a consciousness that a new kind of human arrangement, the metropolis, was coming into being, the defining feature of which would be sustained growth and an ever-increasing complexity in the interaction of its separate functions.¹⁵ In this atmosphere reformers were drawn to the possibility that if they could understand the structure of the metropolis, they might be able to control growth, find rational means to direct expansion, and treat the endemic “distempers,” not by attending to one organ at a time, but by treating every component of this great body as part of one interacting whole.

Thus a sense of loss of control gave rise to an urge to control, to treat the urban illness. Body and contagion metaphors as well as purification rituals articulated the reform agenda and were the byproducts of this age of improvement.¹⁶ According to the anthropologist, Mary Douglas, the main function of these metaphors and rituals is to "impose system on an inherently untidy experience.”¹⁷ How untidy the margins of London must have seemed in the 1830s can be sensed if one imagines what it would have been like to walk them several decades earlier. A man of that time, if a sturdy walker, could make it around the built-up area north of the river in three or four hours. Edgware Road would have taken him north along the western limits; at Marylebone he would have turned eastward and made his way to the City on the New Road, keeping on his left cultivated fields and a large nursery occupying the site where Euston Station would eventually be built. He would then have started on the leg taking him back to the river before reaching Hackney and Stepney, in the 1820s still mostly a patchwork of market gardens. Had our walker decided to visit Camden Town, Islington, Bayswater, Brompton, Chelsea, or Knightsbridge, he would have been aware that he was leaving the city and making an excursion across fields to communities which were still distinct entities.¹⁸ Asked to define his city geographically, our Regency pedestrian could have done so, although not without difficulties; but by the time of Queen Victoria's Coronation he would probably have met the request with a shrug or perhaps have given an ironic smile and answered, “where the trees start turning black.” If pressed, he might then have mentioned the various administrative districts which had been established in recent years, one for the Metropolitan Police, one for the Post Office, another for census purposes and so on, none of these coinciding. Such jurisdictions needed boundary lines, but these were drawn to fit administrative convenience and not the constantly changing city.

Reform also required conceptual and geographic limits. It could single out a specific evil as the root cause of urban sickness — overcrowded slums or defective sanitation facilities — and establish parameters. During the 1830s, however, reformers in greater numbers became aware that cutting a swath through the rookery of St Giles increased density elsewhere, that unplugging traffic stoppages by reconstructing Cannon Street aggravated the congestion around St Paul's Churchyard, and that better drains in Holborn contaminated water supplies taken from the Thames. Recognizing this, they wanted to treat the ever-evolving metropolis as if it were an entity. This difficulty in finding a conceptual framework for urban reform and the need to do so explains why so many early Victorians came to define the city as a circulatory system rather than a fixed place. That redefinition meant that attention was directed to the network of veins and arteries which had, in a sense, become what London was. Groups and individuals intent on “improvement" therefore tended to take up the already well-tried circulatory metaphor, to elaborate on it, and to adjust it to fit their purposes.

An article which appeared in an 1846 edition of the Illustrated London News provides an example of this technique. One passage deserves quoting at some length because it contains so many of the essential ingredients, rhetorical and figurative:

The intercourse and activity of an empire, and the commerce of half a world now run through streets and ways built nearly two centuries ago, and very badly even for the age that planned them, or rather built them without any plan at all. The result is that the streets of London are choked by their ordinary traffic, and the life blood of the huge giant is compelled to run through veins and arteries that have never expanded since the days and dimensions of its infancy. What wonder is it that the circulation is an unhealthy one? That the quantity carried to each part of the frame is insufficient for the demands of its bulk and strength, that there is dangerous pressure in the main channels and morbid disturbance of the current, in all causing daily stoppages of the vital functions, a kind of diurnal apoplexy which the ministrations of Mr. Daniel Whittle Harvey and his surgeons palliate slightly but can never prevent. No widening of these channels between point and point within the great fabric can remove the pressure, at best it will only redistribute it, leaving it on some points, to concentrate on another. The real remedy is the opening of entirely new routes through the whole mess.¹⁹

Here we notice the familiar image of a body ailing because its bulk exceeds the capacity of its circulatory system, only now the predicted consequence is not consumption, dropsy, or fullness of the blood vessels but cerebral haemorrhage, a stroke caused by an obstruction, a clot. The surgeons (Harvey was the City of London Police Commissioner) are advised to make a radical intervention and reroute the main arterial channels, to alter the arrangements of the entire system instead of simply applying local treatment to this or that “morbid disturbance” whenever it declares itself. Instead of recommending an abstemious diet and plenty of fresh country air, this prescription calls for surgery to correct by human art defects or sepsis that natural processes cannot be counted on to cure. Therefore such an approach was, for purposes of reform, an improvement over the plethora model. A methodical program for rebuilding the cardio-vascular system, thereby preventing clots from forming, gave more specific direction, supplied a more compelling rationale, and offered greater hope to an increasingly urbanized population than palliative regimes for removing groups or individuals as far as possible from the poisons which were thought to be intrinsic to city life. These palliatives and the notion of plethora did not lose their popularity until the late nineteenth century, but the threat of imminent apoplexy was a more powerful instrument in the hands of those improvers who believed the character and quality of a city could be measured by the condition of its streets.

Had the nineteenth century as much anxiety about heart disease as the twentieth, the metaphor might have had much greater force. Although coronary thrombosis was identified as early as 1851, it was not until the 1920s that arteriosclerosis became a term that most people, including many doctors, were familiar with. Official statistics did not include heart attack as a cause of death for another decade.²⁰ Even so, Victorians were sufficiently aware of blood clots and their lethal effects to give considerable potency to rhetoric about stoppages and obstructions to the arteries. Punch, for example, included in an 1846 issue an article light-hearted in tone but not in purport, called “Aneurism in the City.” The author admitted that there was a flaw in his comparison: if a human patient had a blocked artery, a surgeon could take it up and expect that its function as a conduit for blood would be taken over “by collateral or anastomosing Vessels,” whereas a congestion in Fleet Street would never be compensated for in a similar fashion: “Chancery Lane becomes no wider.”²¹

Arterial obstruction was not the only powerful diagnostic metaphor available to urban reformers; the language of respiratory illness could also be effectively employed to explain the cause of what an eminent late-Victorian surgeon, Sir John Cantlie, called “urbomorbis.”²² The consequences of breathing bad air had been a topic of discussion for many years before Sir John Evelyn published his Futnifugium in 1661;²³ therefore it is not surprising that Dr Buchan would explain at great lengt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 IMAGINING
• 2 STRAIGHTENING
• 3 SMOOTHING AND REGULATING
• 4 POLICING
• 5 ENJOYING
• 6 WORKING
• 7 CLEANING
• 8 RESCUING
• 9 BREATHING
• 10 INHABITING
• 11 PLANNING
• CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index